Logan Pearsall Smith

A Note on the Author of "Trivia," with Some Examples of His Art

ROGER FRY

TRIVIA and More Irvia are the titles of two little books which have brought Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith an enviable and select celebrity after a lifetime of quiet unobtrusive study. No title could be imagined less ambitious than Trivia—"The daily round, the common task" have furnished Mr. Pearsall Smith with all that he asked as a subject for his art. Pope said—how long ago!—"the proper study of mankind is man" but "man" has resisted the analytic method of science longer than the atoms of primeval matter. Science is indeed only just beginning to apply its acid tests to our self-complacent egoisms and to display the mechanism by which we learn from earliest youth how to lie to ourselves.

The artist like the man of science has to attain to a disinterested detachment before he can find beneath the surface of conventional sentiment the new values, poetic or pictorial, which he needs to express. No wonder then that poets have funked as long as the psychologists this ultimate effort of detachment from the secret self-portrait which we all carry about hidden from the world in our hearts and bring out for pleasant contemplation when we are alone with our thoughts.

Mr. Pearsall Smith like all creative artists is a discoverer and what he has discovered is this hidden self. Even before Freud had begun to show us how cleverly we humbug ourselves, with what ingenuity we hide our disreputable egoisms even from ourselves, Mr. Pearsall Smith had begun his system. With cat-like patience and cunning he sat watching those slight tremors of the conscious surface which betray the old mole of subconscious desire burrowing his way in the subsoil of our souls. But he watched not as a scientist for facts but as an artist for situations. He saw in this perpetual struggle of the conscious pretext and the unconscious desire the opportunity for a new poetic irony, more intimate, more subtle, more finely pointed against our vanity than the grosser ironies of human fate and circumstance.

So new was this view of the comedy of our everyday inner life that Mr. Pearsall Smith had to discover a new literary form wherein to express it. The material was minute, his pieces, like the sonnet, must be each "a moment's monument." But the sonnet is consecrated to moments of exultation, moments when we take the world and ourselves very seriously. It was far too grandiloquent for those ironic moments that Mr. Pearsall Smith loves to perpetuate, the moments when we catch ourselves out. No—for that he judged quite rightly that one must have a prose form rather than verse.

But the very brevity and sharpness of the moment necessitated that its monument should be as finely chiselled in every detail and as carefully polished, as any sonnet. It is prose, it you like, but not the easy-going conversational affair of—let us say—this appreciation. In so short a space each word must be necessary, each word must tell with all its force, each must be as definite, precise and evocative as in the briefest lyric. For myself, I should like to define poetry as that form of writing in which words acquite their fullest resonance and in that case Mr. Pearsall Smith's little pieces are poetry. Here are some samples of his subtle craftsmanship, chosen from his two volumes, Trivia and More Trivia.

The Stars

"BATTLING my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.

I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the constellations. I was one of the Princes of the Starry Universe; in me also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.

Social Success

THE servant gave me my coat and hat, A and in a glow of self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy im-. pressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing."

But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."

Apotheosis

BUT Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe too small to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of Truth, and my umbrella God's umbrella!

Pathos

WHEN winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.

Action

I AM no mere thinker, no mere creature of dreams and imagination. I stamp and post letters; I buy new bootlaces and put them in my boots. And when I set out to get my hair cut, it is with the iron face of those men of empire and unconquerable will, those Caesars and Napoleons, whose footsteps shake the earth.

Lord Arden

"IF I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar, "I A should shut up that great House; it's too big—what can a young unmarried man . . .?"

"If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar's wife (and Mrs. LaMountain's tone showed how much she disapproved of that young Nobleman), "if I were Lord Arden, I should live there, and do my duty to my tenants and neighbours."

"If I were Lord Arden," I said; but then it flashed vividly into my mind, suppose I really were this opulent young Lord? I quite forgot to whom I was talking; my memory was occupied with names of people who had been famous for their enormous pleasures; who had filled their palaces with guilty revels, and built Pyramids, Obelisks, and half-acre Tombs, to soothe their Pride. My mind kindled at the thought of these Audacities. "If I were Lord Arden!" I cried. . . .

In A ready

WHEN I retire from London to my rural W solitudes, and taste once more, as always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate—walks in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of vegetables and flowers—I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the disconcerting secret)— I am incongruously beset by longings of which the Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn of dinnerinvitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the Greenfinch trill his electric bell.